Great Andaman King, whose tribe had miracle tsunami escape, is dead (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Great Andaman King, whose tribe had miracle tsunami escape, is dead

King Jirake’s death in a Chennai hospital last month is a huge loss for
those trying to break linguistic barriers

ABANTIKA GHOSH

NEW DELHI, MAY 2 Four months ago, his tribe’s near-miraculous escape
from the devastating tsunami catapulted King Jirake to fame. His
interviews describing the disaster, and how his tribe was adjusting in
their new quarters in Port Blair, made headlines across the world.
But all that was in stark contrast to the 65-year-old’s quiet and
painful death in a Chennai Hospital on April 17—the tribal chief died
of brain haemorrhage and consequent paralysis.

And apart from the 49 remaining members of his tribe, including Jirake’s
grandson Berebe, who was born days before he died, the only other people
mourning his demise were a group of researchers from the School of
Languages in Jawaharlal Nehru University.

For, Jirake was the last member of his tribe who knew all the 10
variants of the Great Andamanese language. With his death, the
trilingual Great Andamanese-English-Hindi dictionary that Professor
Anvita Abbi’s team from JNU is working on, has suffered a setback that
it will probably never be able to fully recover from.

Not more than 18 of Jirake’s remaining tribesmen speak Great Andamanese
and, after him, there are just five who speak it fluently.

Speaking to The Indian Express from Port Blair, Alok Das, a
sociolinguist member of Professor Abbi’s team, remembers the day Jirake
died. ‘‘At around 10.30 am, when I reached the Adi Basera tribal guest
house in Port Blair where the tribe is presently lodged, I was bemused
when everybody who I met wanted to shake hands with me. In the
one-and-a-half months I have been here, the Great Andamanese had never
shaken hands with me before.”

It was only after some time that Das realised that Jirake was gone and
the tribe traditionally shook hands only when there was a death in the
community.

For Abbi, a professor in the department of linguistics, the greatest
irony of Jirake’s demise is the fact that days before he suffered the
brain stroke, Jirake was found drunk in the streets of Port Blair.
“Alcoholism is something we have introduced among the tribals and that
is only speeding up the process of their extinction. Even in his death
bed, Jirake repeatedly asked for liquor,” she says.

Describing her project as a ‘‘race against the setting sun’’ now, Abbi
says, ‘‘Any disappearance of a unique language is a big loss because it
also means disappearance of indigenous knowledge and culture. Jirake had
vast knowledge about not just his own people but also other tribes. He
was multilingual, his father was from the Bo tribe and his mother from
the Cari tribe. The tribes are now extinct, but Jirake spoke both their
languages apart from a host of others like Jeru, Khora and Pucikwar.’’
The king also knew Burmese and a language called Sadari spoken in the
tribal areas of Ranchi.

URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=69681